Paris
Macula
Irregular
0212-1700
Macula Worldcat
1976-1979
1976-1979
1970s Archival France French Paris
Accessed
Periodical's Overview
“En 1976, un groupe d’historiens de l’art, de plasticiens et d'amateurs se constitue en éditant la revue Macula. Jean Clay, pilier central, s’allie la collaboration d’autres historiens de l’art et critiques dont Pierre Brochet, Yve-Alain Bois, Rosalind Krauss... Axée sur le monde des idées, centrée sur les arts visuels allant de l’antiquité à la période contemporaine, la revue compte six numéros, dont les deux dernières livraisons sont doubles.”[1]“
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“Comme si l’histoire de l’art avait le privilege d’ignorer la mutation dès longtemps signalée par Foucault dans le champ de l’histoire, et tenait encore - par opposition à la notion de monument - les ouvres de peinture pour les documents, traces muettes qu’il s’agirait de faire parler."
“(…) Rapprocher les lointains, questionner les proximités. Ainsi le texte du peintre, témoin souvent égaré de sa pratique: on feint trop souvent d’ignorer l’écart qui sépare l’image de son commentaire (comme si celui-ci pouvait maîtriser celle-là): l’écrit de l’artiste est le lieu meme où cette faille se donne à lire.”
(…) en publiant les textes cachés, confisqués de/sur l’art, renouveler le tissu documentaire, créer des conditions d’investigation inédites. (…) Enoncés considérés moins dans le moment de leur inscription que pour l’effet qu’ils déclenchent aujourd’hui (…) Actualité (disruptive, polémique) de ces texts-ci: la question qu’ils ne cessent d’opposer à LA peinture, à ses cadres théoriques, idéologiques, formels…"
(…) Annulation des spécificités? Sauf à tomber dans ce panneau: rater l’avancée que telle ou telle pratique figurante fraye dans le champ épistémologique à des moments précis de l’histoire, ponctuant, transformant, réagençant le savoir. Tel précipité iconique serait à considérer non plus comme “système modelisant secondaire” mais bien comme matrice formalisant le travail de la théorie (…) et même comme opérateur du texte philosophique et psychanalytique actuel, où la figure fonctionne ici en tant que relance, recours conceptuel - icono-logique - et là en tant de prétexte à débrider, débander le discours, faire diversion dans la perte, le flou, l’ébat, dans le paradis introuvable des flux, dans “l’indicible” et ses bavardages, dans l’indifférencié…”[2]
Selected Subject Headings
- Art - philosophy - 20th century
- Artists - political and social views - Soviet Union
- Artists’ writings
- Bauhaus - curricula
- Censorship in art
- Communism and motion pictures - Soviet Union
- Etching - 17th century
- Drawing - 16th century
- Logical atomism
- Neoplasticism
- Optics - history
- Painting - semiotics
- Painting, Abstract - 20th century
- Supports-Surfaces (group)
- Visual perception - theory
- Wood-engravers - Great Britain - biography
Notes
A collection of unsigned fragments constitutes the only editorial statement from Macula. We have selected and reproduced above some of these “extraits de l’éditorial,” some fragments that provide us a truncated intellectual framework to help us understand this journal. As if we were witnesses to a conversation between unnamed interlocutors, we can nonetheless read through this text a sense of urgency, a rigorous approach to a discipline under siege: Art History.
The year is 1976, and the location is Paris.
Art critic Jean Clay and art historian Yve-Alain Bois appear to be the central figures of this publishing endeavor and what emerges from the overall journal project is a desire to find a way to continue the specificities of a discipline, a discipline perhaps emerging somehow bruised from the fraught epistemological landscape that was France after the events of the late 1960s and its related intellectual turmoil. Or to be even more precise, it appears as if art historians were regrouping after coming to terms with the changed epistemological landscape that emerged in Western society after decolonization.
Even though Jean Clay had written in 1967 a text entitled “La peinture est finie,”[3] in 1976 we discern a radical shift in appreciation as one could argue that above all Macula is a journal dedicated to painting and painters, and abstraction in particular. Clay’s change in appreciation could have been motivated by a variety of factors or possibly, as a reaction to the French intelligentsia’s Maoist excesses or the prompt commercialization of Kinetic art, a development closely associated with Clay and Robho, a late 1960s journal edited by him;[4] amidst the pervasive video and conceptualist practices, Clay and Bois’ interest in painting could have been fueled by a desire to reposition it as a theoretical tool, not dissimilar to the discourse surrounding painting in our days.
As a theoretical journal in defense of a discipline, Macula didn’t reside only in its present; there were forays into the past in order to study antecedents, importantly artists’ writings and thoughts, which is a refreshing move. Through its pages we can read texts from Piet Mondrian, Max Bill, Wladyslaw Strzeminski, Josef Albers, Louis Kahn, Christian Bonnefoi, Robert Ryman, Martin Barré or Lygia Clark, as well as an interesting collection of correspondence between Jean Gorin and an illustrious list of early avant-garde figures.
But not only artists are given voice in Macula’s pages; philosophers, art historians and art critics are also present; a cursory database query would retrieve names like Meyer Shapiro, Hubert Damisch, Jurgis Baltrusaitis, Guy Brett, Erwin Panofsky, Jacques Derrida or Walter Benjamin, among many others.
Importantly, Clement Greenberg’s writings on Pollock were also valiantly translated into French and published in the journal’s pages;[5] a derided figure by then, to translate and publish Greenberg was, according to Bois,[6] a daring intellectual move for the times; from our distance this might not be such a surprising gesture if one is aware that Rosalind Krauss was Macula’s “correspondante aux Etats-Unis,” and her influential essay "Notes on the index" was also translated and published in Macula's pages.[7] The presence of Krauss and the future role of Bois as an editor of the journal October gives us an indication of the theoretical frameworks and art historical affinities espoused by both journals as well as their staunch defense of disciplinary specificities.
In “All about Yve,” a 1995 interview with Bois,
We do somehow agree with these statements, but it could also be nuanced that cultural studies were but an initial step, a corrective one; nonetheless, an important step geared towards considering “different” objects of knowledge as requiring the same kind of care, attention and love that Macula dedicates to its chosen artists and art works. In fact, it would be precisely this epistemological opening up to the unknown that would enact the powerful theoretical premise espoused and articulated by this very interesting journal.
We write these words in 2013 and we continue to be in search of the simple but encompassing gesture of “rapprocher les lointains, questionner les proximités,” a generous thought movement that would allow an acknowledgment of our many blind spots and the perceptive discovery of the abundant and specific richness yet to be explored.
It might be near us or far from us, but it is definitively with us.
To peruse the indexed contents of Macula, please log into the database.
References
[1]Éditions Macula website.
[2]"Extraits de l'éditorial," Macula (Paris), no. 1 (1976): 1-3.
[3]Jean Clay. "La peinture est finie," Robho (Paris), no. 1 (July 1967); translated in Studio international (London), (July-August 1967).
[4]Robho was edited in Paris by Jean Clay and poet Julien Blaine between 1967 and 1971. For its interest in Kinetic art and coverage of Latin American artists, Robho could be thought in relation with the British periodical Signals. Robho's indexing in ccindex is forthcoming.
[5]Greenberg, Clement. "Les textes sur Pollock," Macula (Paris), no. 2 (Spring 1977): 40-56. The dossier includes Greenberg's writings on Pollock from 1943 to 1967.
[6]We quote Bois: "The funny thing is that, when we published it in France in the mid seventies, a lot of our American friends said “are you crazy?!” At that time Greenberg had become very reactionary politically. He had also been denounced as corrupt, in cohoots with the market." Jane de Almeida. "Interview with Yve-Alain Bois, July 2nd, 2005 in his office at Harvard University." Jane de Almeida.
[7]Krauss, Rosalind E. "Notes sur l'index: l'art des années 1970 aux Etats-Unis," Macula (Paris), no. 5-6 (1979): 165-175.
[8]Andrew McNamara and Rex Butler. "All about Yve: an interview with Yve-Alain Bois," Eyeline (Brisbane), vol. 27 (Autumn-Winter 1995): 16-21.
- Mondrian's Thought Movement.
- De la suppression de l'objet.
- Baltrusaitis' miroirs.
- Dernière limite.
- Pontormo, 20th century.
- Revue trimestrielle.